“How Much Schoolteachers Are Paid.” Orange = average monthly salary according to ONF survey, in rubles; blue = average monthly salary according to Rosstat (Russian State Statistics Service), in rubles. From top to bottom, the two sets of figures are provided for Moscow, Arkhangelsk Region, St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, Leningrad Region, Murmansk Region, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Orenburg Region, Volgograd Region, Vladimir Region, Voronezh Region, Pskov Region, Kostroma Region, and Rostov Region. The figures given are for the period January–March 2018. Courtesy of Vedomosti

A third of Russian schoolteachers do not know how their salaries are calculated or whether incentive payments and reimbursements are added to their paychecks. This was one finding of a survey carried out by the Russian People’s Front (ONF) in May 2018, during which researchers interviewed more than 3,000 teachers in 82 regions.

“Wage growth remains insignificant, making it impossible to attain the wage levels claimed by Rosstat,” the ONF concluded.

In Murmansk Region, for example, the survey showed teachers earned an average of ₽36,382 a month [approx. €495 a month], while official statistics showed they earned ₽50,560 a month [approx. €688 a month].

But even the salary the teachers earn comes at the price of an extremely heavy workload, the researchers stressed. The workload was heaviest in Kemerovo, Kostroma, and Samara Regions, where teachers averaged over thirty classes a week.

A quarter of schoolteachers have second jobs or hold additional positions at the same school, while twenty percent think of quitting the profession due to the heavy workload. Seven percent of the teachers surveyed spoke of not having been paid at all or paid in full at times. Twenty-three percent said their paychecks had been miscalculated, while fifty-seven percent had not been paid for overtime or additional duties.

Lyubov Dukhanina, deputy chair of the State Duma’s education committee and a member of the ONF’s central staff, argues the current nontransparent system of calculating salaries, which divides salaries into basic pay and incentive pay, should be abandoned. Instead, teachers should receive a guaranteed salary for their work. She also notes that, according to many teachers, incentive payments are unfair and opaque, and the amount of these payments can vary wildly from month to month.

Igor Remorenko, rector of Moscow State Pedagogical University and former deputy education minister, said all systems of compensation include guaranteed basic pay.

“In organizations undergoing reform, the lower the guaranteed basic pay, the better, because it enables you to rotate employees. In stable organizations, the constant part of the paycheck is more important, because it motivates employees. We need to move in the direction of having teachers sign annual contracts and feel confident in the future, while accepting the possibility of being paid different amounts depending on differing workloads from month to month,” said Remorenko.

“There are legal means of turning tiny salaries into big salaries on paper. For example, in Moscow, until 2018, the statistics included only full-time employees who had open-ended contracts, while the part-timers, who earned less money, were not included in the stats,” said Lukhovitsky.

According to Lukhovitsky, a law bill would be tabled in the State Duma this autumn that would establish a guaranteed minimum salary, equal to at least two minimum wages, for eighteen academic hours.

“It’s nice a large organization like the ONF has supported our conclusions four years after we started talking about going back to a fixed salary,” said Lukhovitsky.

Naturally, teachers are dissatisfied with their salaries. They are thus fertile ground for the ONF, argues political scientist Konstantin Kalachev. Teachers play a key role in elections and the entire political system.

[The ONF is a pro-Putin, astroturfed “populist” front organization. Teachers are critical to the Putin regime because many of them serve as polling station workers during elections, due to the fact that polling stations are commonly set up in schools. Teachers are thus often involved in the systematic vote rigging and electoral fraud that have helped keep Putin and his allies in power for twenty years—TRR.]

“The current system of governance sometimes needs to let off steam. There is nothing frightening about the fact the stats are fudged, and the president’s May decrees are not fully implemented. The president sets tasks, and if they are not solved that is the problem of the people trying to solve them,” said Kalachev.

It is pensioners, teachers, and physicians who have the most impact on approval ratings, “so it makes sense the powers that be are focused on worrying about teachers,” he concluded.

Information on the salaries of federal ministers in 2016 has disappeared from the website of the Russian Finance Ministry. The information was deleted a day after RBC published the article “Finance Ministry Discloses Salaries of Ministers for First Time.”

More than ten sets of publicly accessible information, including the number of employees and average monthly salaries at state ministries and agencies, the number of official vehicles, etc., was posted by the Finance Ministry on December 11. On December 27, RBC discovered the open data essentially disclosed the official average monthly salaries of the heads of federal ministries, except the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry, for 2016. Previously, information about the salaries of ministers had not been disclosed.

Screenshot of Russian Finance Ministry website page that had previously listed the salaries of ministers. Now it reads, “Error 404: Page Not Found.”

The liaison officer at the IT Department for State and Municipal Finance Management and Budget Processs Informational Support has not responded to our request for information. The Finance Ministry’s press secretary also failed to respond to our request.

In the open data, now inaccessible, the Finance Ministry disclosed the average monthly salary of “employees holding public offices” at each of the federal ministries. Since only one person, the minister, occupies public office at each ministry, the data actually amounted to information about the salaries of ministers.

Accordingly, the finance minister was the highest paid minister in 2016, earning 1.729 million rubles a month [approx. 25,000 euros]. He was followed by the economic development minister, who earned 1.266 million rubles a month [approx. 18,000 euros] and the energy minister, who earned 1.155 million rubles a month [approx. 16,700 euros]. They earned from eleven to thirteen times more than the average staffer in their ministries. Twelve ministers listed their ministerial salaries as basically their only source of declared income, according to our calculations.

RBC has learned that publication of ministers’ salaries has provoked discontent in the ministries. Thus, a source in one ministry compared it with “sabotage.”

The information removed from public access had mostly been published on the Finance Ministry’s website in June 2017. The .pdf file contained information about the number of employees in federal ministries, the travel expenses of federal ministries and state agencies, and the number of official vehicles, but not the salaries of individual ministers, which was disclosed for the first time.

What Else the Finance Ministry’s Data Told Us
In 2016, Russian federal ministries and agencies owned or used a total of 47,000 vehicles. The average monthly cost of maintaining each vehicle was 27,000 rubles [approx. 390 euros].

The Prosecutor General’s Office (its central administration and regional offices) had the most vehicles: 4,269. The Federal Bailiff Service was in second place, with 4,209 vehicles, followed by the Federal Tax Service, with 4,030 vehicles. The Emergency Situations Ministry had approximately 3,500 vehicles at its disposal, while the Investigative Committee, Federal Customs Service, and the Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography (Rosreestr) each had approximately 3,000 vehicles in their motor pools.

In 2016, the Health Ministry, which had only 47 vehicles at its disposal, had the most expensive maintenance costs per vehicle: 341,000 rubles [approx. 4,900 euros]. The Russian Government’s maintenance cost per vehicle was 327,000 rubles. It had a motor pool of 270 vehicles.

Last year, the federal ministries and agencies spent almost 7 billion rubles on official travel [approx. 101 million euros]. The biggest spenders were the Federal Customs Service and the Federal Tax Service, which spent 742 million rubles and 712 million rubles, respectively. If we talk only about official foreign travel, the biggest spender was the Foreign Ministry: it spent 200 million rubles on travel abroad in 2016. It was followed by the Finance Ministry and the Economic Development Ministry, which spent 57.9 million rubles and 51.8 million rubles, respectively, on official trips abroad.

Given the dismal state of Russian healthcare, many people practice folk medicine. Photo by TRR

Experts Predict Reduction in Number of Hospitals to 1913 Levels
Polina ZvezdinaRBC
April 7, 2017

The optimization of healthcare has led to massive hospital closures and a decrease in the quality of medicine in Russia, experts say. By 2021–2022, the number of hospitals in the country might drop to the level of the Russian Empire.

Hospitals of the Russian Empire
Between 2000 and 2015, the number of hospitals in Russia halved, dropping from 10,700 to 5,400, according to calculations made by analysts from the Center for Economic and Political Reform (CEPR), based on data from Rosstat. In a report entitled “Burying Healthcare: Optimization of the Russian Healthcare System in Action,” CEPR analysts note that if the authorities continue to shutter hospitals at the current pace (353 a year), the number of hospitals nationwide will have dropped to 3,000 by 2021–2022, which was the number of hospitals in the Russian Empire in 1913. (RBC has obtained a copy of the report.)

Healthcare reform kicked off in 2010, when the law on compulsory health insurance was adopted, David Melik-Guseinov, director of the Moscow Health Department’s Healthcare Organization Research Institute reminded our correspondent. It consisted in optimizing costs by closing inefficient hospitals and expanding the use of high-tech health facilities. The authors of the CEPR’s report explained that they examined a fifteen-year period when Vladimir Putin was in power, including his tenure as prime minister. In addition, the vigorous reform and optimization of healthcare kicked off between 2003 and 2005, as is evident from the statistics on the numbers of hospitals and outpatient clinics.

Hot on the heels of the hospitals, the number of hospital beds also decreased during the fifteen-year period: on average by 27.5%, down to 1.2 million, according to the CEPR’s calculations. In the countryside, the reduction of hospital beds has been more blatant: the numbers there have been reduced by nearly 40%. These data have been confirmed by Eduard Gavrilov, director of the Health Independent Monitoring Foundation. According to Gavrilov, the number of hospital beds has been reduced by 100,000 since 2013 alone.

Melik-Guseinov agrees the numbers of hospitals and beds have been decreasing, but argues these figures cannot be correlated with the quality of medical service and patient care. The primary indicator is the number of hospitalizations, and that number has been growing, he claims. For example, 96,000 more people were discharged in Moscow in 2016 than in 2015. This means that, although hospital bed numbers have gone done, hospital beds have been used more efficiently. Each hospital bed should be occupied 85–90% of the time, Melik-Guseinov stresses. If beds stand empty, they need to removed.

Outmaneuvering Outpatient Clinics
As the CEPR’s report indicates, the trend towards a decrease in hospitals and hospital beds could be justified were resources redistributed to outpatient clinics, but they too are being closed in Russia. During the period from 2000 to 2015, their numbers decreased by 12.7%, down to 18,600 facilities, while their workload increased from 166 patients a day to 208 patients.

“The planned maneuver for shifting the workload and resources from hospitals to outpatient clinics did not actually take place. The situation became more complex both in the fields of inpatient and outpatient care,” conclude the authors of the report.

In its report, CEPR also cites the outcome of an audit of healthcare optimization performed by the Federal Audit Chamber. The audit led the analysts to conclude that the reforms had reduced the availability of services. As the CEPR notes, the incidence of disease increased among the population by 39.1% during the period 2000–2015. Detected neoplasms increased by 35.7%, and circulatory diseases, by 82.5%. The analysts personally checked the accessibility of medical care in the regions. The report’s authors tried to get an appointment with a GP in a small Russian city, for example, Rybinsk, in Yaroslavl Region. If they had been real patients, they would have waited 21 days to see a doctor. In addition, write the analysts, hospitals do not have a number of drugs, such as dipyrone, phenazepam, and ascorbic acid.

Melik-Guseinov is certain that one cannot rely on data on the incidence of disease among the population as an indicator of deteriorating healthcare in Russia. He points out that what is at stake is not the incidence of disease per se, but diagnosis. The fact that the more illnesses are detected is a good thing.

Fastfood Wages
The CEPR’s analysts write that the lack of medicines in hospitals reflects another problems in Russian healthcare: its underfunding. The government constantly claims expenditures on healthcare have been increasing, but, taking inflation into account, on the contrary, they have been falling. The CEPR refers to an analysis of the Federal Mandatory Medical Insurance Fund. Their analysts calculated that its actual expenditures would fall by 6% in 2017 terms of 2015 prices.

“A physician’s hourly salary is comparable, for example, to the hourly pay of a rank-and-file worker at the McDonald’s fastfood chain (approx. 138 rubles an hour). A store manager in the chain makes around 160 rubles an hour, meaning more than a credentialed, highly educated doctor,” note the analysts in the CEPR’s report.

According to a survey of 7,500 physicians in 84 regions of Russia, done in February 2017 by the Health Independent Monitoring Foundation, around half of the doctors earn less than 20,000 rubles [approx. 330 euros] a month per position, the Foundation’s Eduard Gavrilov told RBC.

Compulsory medical insurance rates do not cover actual medical care costs, argue the CEPR’s analysts. For example, a basic blood test costs around 300 rubles, whereas outpatient clinics are paid 70 to 100 rubles on average for the tests under compulsory medical insurance. Hence the growing number of paid services. Thus, the amount paid for such services grew between 2005 and 2014 from 109.8 billion rubles to 474.4 billion rubles.

The authors of the report conclude that insurance-based medicine is ineffective in Russia. Given the country’s vast, underpopulated territory, one should not correlate money with the number of patients. This leads to underfunding and the “inevitable deterioration of medical care in small towns and rural areas.”

“It is necessary to raise the issue of reforming insurance-based medicine and partly returning to the principles of organizing and financing the medical network that existed in the Soviet Union,” the analysts conclude.

RBC expects a response from the Health Ministry.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade AT for the heads-up

Medvedev: It Is Wrong to Compare Low Salaries of Schoolteachers and High Salaries of the Security Services This was the premier’s reply to complaint from resident of Dagestan at Terra Scientia
Alexei ObukhovMoskovsky Komsomolets
August 3, 2016

Russian Federation Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev made a bold statement at the youth forum Terra Scientia on the Klyazma River. Replying to the question of why a teacher’s salary in Dagestan is four or five times lower than that of a security services officer, the politician said it was wrong to compare the two professions.

As reported by Zebra TV, a young man from the Caucasian republic posed the question to the premier. According to the young man, a teacher in Dagestan might earn 10,000 to 15,000 rubles a month [approx. 130 to 200 euros a month], while an employee of a law enforcement agency could earn 50,000 rubles a month [approx. 675 euros a month].

In response, Medvedev noted the two professions were not comparable. As an example, he cited his own experience. When he finished university, his monthly salary [during Soviet times] was 90 rubles a month, as opposed to 250 rubles a month for policemen.

However, noted Medvedev, his priority was graduate school, not a career in the Interior Ministry or the prosecutor’s office, although he had received an offer.

Earlier at Terra Scientia, a female participant had complained about her inability to get a mortgage although she had two university degrees and worked in an orphanage. The discussion’s moderator chided the young woman for asking such a question while holding an iPhone. The woman claimed the smartphone had been a gift. However, she never did get an answer to her question.

Translated by the Russian Reader. PM Medvedev’s “outrageous” behavior in this case is wholly consistent with Nikolai Mironov’s analysis, two months ago in the same newspaper, of Putin’s need for a “bad” prime minister, a fall guy and scapegoat for all purposes and seasons.